My ship will take me very far.

So that I can rest among the stars.

But it’s not goodbye,

it’s just my time

-to finally shine.

Hey, Space Cadet - Car Seat Headrest | Space Travel is Boring - Modest Mouse | Lassie Went to the Moon - Camper Van Beethoven | Yellow - Robert Service | A Dog Has Died - Pablo Neruda | Beach Life-In-Death - Car Seat Headrest

just some Laika appreciation

btw if we were searching for gold on the dawson trail together and you were succumbing to hypothermia and your last request was for me to cremate you somehow, i'd do it

Vintage Pulp - North West Romances (Fall1949)

Fiction House

Ask the Animal

[A/N: I read The Best of Robert Service and then wrote this on the plane. I'm happy to hear feedback! TW for themes of death and bodies. Also no, none of this is true.]

Above my cabin door a boar’s head hangs upon a nail, A taxidermized grin as in the midst of raging roar,  Tends to alarm or charm my guests–the squeamish, without fail,  Will claim it cruel or ghoulish but they never asked the boar. 

Above the fire, hung some higher, horns sharp as a knife,  A hold, a jolt, a captive bolt left hole in angus’ skull.  The abattoir that marred him claimed he gladly gave his life,  But who can say when there’s no way they ever asked the bull. 

My windowsill hosts a bed still post feline’s life upended,  And her, my pet, the guests upset most often point to that.  For in a jar, now safe from cars, my darling floats suspended.  Did she want this? Well, that I missed–I never asked the cat. 

And there’s one more, behind a door which guests may never pass,  Behind the locks a bone-filled box where this dark hoard began.  Human remains, to me the same, as any beast in grass,  See, I did ask, and did the task, on the wishes of the man.

Queen of Knives (I don't have my own copy of Smoke and Mirrors with me and didn't find a link)

Mahabharata

Paul Revere's Ride

Bisclavret

The Waste Land

The Cremation of Sam McGee

The Raven

Divine Comedy

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Okay so I still have a few names (notably Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and John Milton) in mind for at least another poll, maybe two or even three if you make suggestions. Thank you for the ones you've already made, by the way ! (I favor the lay of the Honeysuckle but it'll go in another poll just as the Shooting of Dan McGrew)

Yes I know this one is difficult too. Good luck.

My tag for this series is 'narrative poems'. Other poetry polls in my 'poetry' tag.

Book Lover's Day

Scrooge McDuck likes poetry, apparently

This earth is ours to love: lute, brush and pen, They are but tongues to tell of life sincerely.

Robert Service, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone

There are strange things done in the midnight sun by men who moil for gold

sorry for cremation of sam mcgee posting it’s just that i’m having breakfast at THE robert service table at the robert service restaurant in victoria and the poem is on the wall behind me so it’s in my brain rn

The Spell of the Yukon  // Robert W. Service

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;    I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;    I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it—     Came out with a fortune last fall,— Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,    And somehow the gold isn’t all. No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)    It’s the cussedest land that I know, From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it    To the deep, deathlike valleys below. Some say God was tired when He made it;    Some say it’s a fine land to shun; Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it    For no land on earth—and I’m one. You come to get rich (damned good reason);    You feel like an exile at first; You hate it like hell for a season,    And then you are worse than the worst. It grips you like some kinds of sinning;    It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it’s been since the beginning;    It seems it will be to the end. I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow    That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim; I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow    In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,    And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,    With the peace o’ the world piled on top. The summer—no sweeter was ever;    The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river,    The bighorn asleep on the hill. The strong life that never knows harness;    The wilds where the caribou call; The freshness, the freedom, the farness—    O God! how I’m stuck on it all. The winter! the brightness that blinds you,    The white land locked tight as a drum, The cold fear that follows and finds you,    The silence that bludgeons you dumb. The snows that are older than history,    The woods where the weird shadows slant; The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,    I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t. There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,    And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless,    And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons;    There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,    And I want to go back—and I will. They’re making my money diminish;    I’m sick of the taste of champagne. Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish    I’ll pike to the Yukon again. I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;    It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before; And it’s better than this by a damsite—    So me for the Yukon once more. There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;    It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting    So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,    It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,    It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

Publisher’s Binding Thursday

Hello and welcome to another installation of Publisher’s Binding Thursday! This week we have Rhymes of a Red Cross Man by British-Canadian writer Robert W. Service (1874-1958). Published in 1916 by Barse and Hopkins, the book is filled with verse related to Service’s service with the  Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross—he worked as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver during the World War I after being turned down when he tried to enlist. Service wrote several popular books of verse and was clear not to call it poetry, saying of his work: 

“Verse, not poetry, is what I was after ... something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please."

The binding is quite nice, featuring a Red Cross man standing on the battlefield looking through binoculars in front of a gold backdrop with a large red cross. There are clouds or smoke in the background that I assume would once have all been white, but have worn away to a reddish-purple color. 

--  Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

May 18, 1940: Enrollees of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps in New York as they sailed on the liner SS Manhattan for war duty in Europe.

The AVAC began during World War I. Some distinguished writers volunteered, including John Dos Passos, Robert Service, and e.e. cummings. Henry James was chairman of the Corps in France.

Photo: AP via the Denver Post

“Nearly all the accused had been savagely beaten. Bukharin was spared this but was visibly a broken man. From his prison cell he had written a note to Stalin: 'Koba, why is my death necessary for you?' But Stalin wanted blood. Constantly consulted by Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski and Vasili Ulrikh at the end of the court's working day, he ordered that the world's press should be convinced of the veracity of the confessions before sentences were passed. Many Western journalists were indeed hoodwinked. The verdict was announced on 13 March: nearly all the defendants were to be shot.

Two days later Stalin approved a further operation to purge 'anti-Soviet elements’. This time he wanted 57,200 people to be arrested across the USSR. Of these, he and Yezhov had agreed, fully 48,000 were to be rapidly tried by troiki and executed. Yezhov, by now practised at the management of such operations, attended to his duties with enthusiasm. Through spring, summer and autumn 1938 the carnage continued as the NKVD meat-grinder performed its grisly task on Stalin's behalf. Having put Yezhov's hand at the controls and ordered him to start the machine, Stalin could keep it running as long as it suited him.

Stalin never saw the Lubyanka cellars. He did not even glimpse the meat-grinder of the operations. Yezhov asked for and received vast resources for his work. He needed more than his executive officials in the NKVD to complete it. The Great Terror required stenographers, guards, executioners, cleaners, torturers, clerks, railwaymen, truck drivers and informers. Lorries marked ‘Meat' or 'Vegetables’ took victims out to rural districts such as Butovo near Moscow where killing fields had been prepared. Trains, often travelling through cities by night, transported Gulag prisoners to the Russian Far North, to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in wagons designed for cattle. The unfortunates were inadequately fed and watered on the journey, and the climate - bitterly cold in the winter and monstrously hot in summer - aggravated the torment. Stalin said he did not want the NKVD's detainees to be given holiday-home treatment. The small comforts that had been available to him in Novaya Uda, Narym, Solvychegodsk or even Kureika were systematically withheld. On arrival in the labour camps they were kept constantly hungry. Yerhov's dieticians had worked out the minimum calorie intake for them to carry out heavy work in timber felling, gold mining or building construction; but the corruption in the Gulag was so general that inmates rarely received their full rations - and Stalin made no recorded effort to discover what conditions were really like for them.

Such was the chaos of the Great Terror that despite Stalin's insistence that each victim should be formally processed by the troiki, the number of arrests and executions has not been ascertained with exactitude. Mayhem precluded such precision. But all the records, different as ther are about details, point in the same general direction. Altogether it would seem that a rough total of one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937-8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. To be caught in the maw of the NKVD usually meant to face a terrible sentence. The troiki worked hard at their appalling task. The impression got around - or was allowed to get around - that Stalin used nearly all of the arrestees as forced labourers in the Gulag. In fact the NKVD was under instructions to deliver about half of its victims not to the new camps in Siberia or north Russia but to the execution pits outside most cities. Roughly three quarters of a million persons perished under a hail of bullets in that brief period of two years. The Great Terror had its ghastly logic.” - Robert Service, ‘Stalin: A Biography’ (2004) [p. 355 - 356]

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out--it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

Robert Service

Anyone a fan of archery?

Been doing it over the last few months for exercise and fun, and I dig it! Delve featured a level with a very basic archery minigame and I'm excited for the minigame jam - going to expand out that minigame!

The theme is space, so we're doing a fun space western version of archery where you re-enact a legendary tournament. Think Robin Hood's famed tournament...but in space, so you'll have to factor in things like gravity and solar wind.

Your arcbow/plasmabow/??? of choice will affect shooting potential, while maps will rotate giving a range of gravity and wind conditions.

Trying to get Twine to make a moving meter (ala Tekken bowling) to introduce a real-time timing element.

Also want to make image mapping record where you click and calculate things like wind/gravity offsets. I'm thinking this is going to be a fun (headache?) challenge with responsive image mapping!

There will be light story in the form of a narrated poem about the legendary tournament you are re-enacting, based on the wonderful poems of Robert Service, a poet who wrote about the Yukon frontier. Space is, after all, the final frontier!

Rough draft of the starting narration:

The nights on Mars are long and hard as the crimson wind gusts and blows - yet in the bar, between the yarns, there's truth if you listen close.

Now Ned the Red could shoot them dead, in a blink from a lunar pace - but his steps were dogged by the corporate hog known as the ol' Sheriff Root Chase.